


here's to everything (coming down to nothing)

by shineyma



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 20:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4319931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grant was not expecting this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here's to everything (coming down to nothing)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm behind on comment replies again; sorry! But I promise I have a really good reason this time. So please be patient with me!
> 
> Title is from Taylor Swift's _Forever and Always_. Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review!

Grant honestly isn’t all that surprised, when he reaches the third-floor lab, to find that two of his agents are in a stand-off with Simmons. After all, he heard on comms when they found her here, and she’s not the type to go down without a fight.

He _is_ , however, surprised by her reaction to his arrival.

“Oh, thank goodness,” she says, and lowers her gun.

He gives a look to Warrington and Hicks that ensures they don’t follow suit, then gives Simmons a once-over. The bottom of the shirt she’s wearing has been torn off, leaving her midriff bare, and the red-stained purple fabric wrapped around her left forearm gives him a pretty good idea of why. Add that to the blood-caked gash above her left eyebrow and the bruise coming in on her jaw, and it’s pretty obvious she’s had a rough day.

Which makes the smile she’s aiming at him that much more weird.

“Gotta say,” he says. “That’s not the greeting I was expecting.”

“No?” she asks, brow furrowing.

“No,” he confirms, and nods to Hicks. “You wanna hand your gun over to my man, there?”

“Oh! Of course,” she says, shaking her head like she’s embarrassed to have not done it already. “Here you are.”

Hicks accepts the gun and tucks it away without lowering his own, which doesn’t appear to bother Simmons at all.

“You know…If I didn’t know any better,” Grant says, reading her face, “I’d think you were happy to see me.”

“Why wouldn’t I be happy to see you?” she asks.

He raises his eyebrows. “Last I checked, you were pretty angry at me.”

Understatement.

“Yes!” Her eyes go wide. “Right! Of course. I’m very angry at you for…”

She trails off, face scrunching up and one hand raised like she’s got a word on the tip of her tongue and hopes to pluck it out of the air.

“For…”

“Dropping you out of the Bus?” he offers dryly.

“Yes!” she says, brightening. “Yes, that’s it exactly.”

He gives her another once-over, evaluating. She _looks_ like Simmons. The face could be explained by a photostatic veil, but she’s the right body size and shape, and with the way her shirt’s torn, he can see the scar she got on their mission in Kenya. He stitched that cut himself; he’d know it anywhere.

She looks like Simmons, she moves like Simmons, and she talks like Simmons—Simmons when she’s trying to hide something, that is. But there’s definitely something up here.

“Just that?” he asks. “Not any of the other things?”

Simmons’ eyes widen and then dart around the room. Finding no escape, she offers him an uncertain smile.

“No?” she asks. And then, more firmly, “No. What you did was…very, very wrong, but I’ve decided to forgive you. Nothing is achieved or earned by holding grudges.”

He laughs. It’s such a ridiculous thing to say, after the way their last conversation went, that he just can’t help it. She relaxes a little, but his next words bring the tension right back.

“All right,” he says. “Who are you, really?”

“What do you mean?” she asks. She’s clearly trying to sound confused, but mostly she just sounds hunted. “I’m Jemma Simmons. Who else would I be?”

“Someone who has no idea that the last time Simmons and I met, she tried to kill me,” he says. “Or that the things she’s angry about are a lot worse than minor grudges.”

She opens her mouth like she’s going to argue, pauses, and then wilts.

“Oh, very well,” she sighs. “I suppose I’m caught.” She looks around the room, then waves a hand at a nearby desk. “Do you mind if I sit down for this? I’ve lost a fair amount of blood; I’m feeling a _bit_ unsteady.”

There are no end of potential weapons to be found on a desk ( _especially_ a scientist’s desk), but she is looking pretty woozy, so he compromises. He grabs the desk chair and drags it over to her; then, as she sits, grabs one for himself.

“Okay,” he says, dropping into the chair. “Explain away.”

“That’s the thing,” she says, fiddling with the fabric wrapped around her left arm, “I _can’t_ explain. I’m not Jemma Simmons, and I’ve no idea why everyone thinks I am.”

Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t that.

He really doesn’t even know where to start untangling that sentence, so he prompts her to continue with a simple, “No?”

“No,” she says, a little plaintively. “I’ve never met anyone named Jemma Simmons. I’ve never even _heard_ of anyone named Jemma Simmons. I don’t know why—well, I _do_ know why they think I’m her, but I don’t understand it at all.”

“Okay, let’s start with something simple,” he says. “What’s your name?”

“Michelle Avery,” she says promptly, with a sigh of what he judges to be honest relief. “Thank you.”

“For…?”

“Asking,” she says. “Believing me, I suppose. I’ve been trying for days to tell these people who I am, but none of them would listen.”

That only brings up more questions—and he’s already got a few dozen. There are some rational, if off-the-wall, explanations for Simmons having an identical twin somewhere out in the world, but none of them would account for…Michelle?…having that scar, or any—let alone all—of Simmons’ particular mannerisms.

“You said you know why,” he says. “So…?”

“Well, apparently we’re identical,” she says, a little uncomfortably. “They showed me a picture—if I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was of me.” She gestures to the desk, and Grant jerks his chin at Warrington, who moves to dig through it. “That’s how I knew that you’d think you knew me…and why I thought you were friends with Jemma Simmons. You’re in it, too.”

“Huh.” He accepts the picture that Warrington brings over and sees, with some surprise, that it’s of the old team—minus Skye, who took the picture. “I remember this.”

It’s from a mission they had in Madrid near the end of their time as a team—only a week before the mission to find the Clairvoyant, the one that ended up running right into the uprising. He can see why Michelle would get the impression that they’re friends from it; in it, Simmons has her arms wrapped around his waist in a kind of sideways hug, while he’s got one of his draped around her shoulders.

He smiles to himself, a little, remembering the frankly hysterical bargaining Skye did to get them to agree to that position, and Coulson’s playful counterargument about how maybe _he_ wanted to be the one to cuddle up to Grant.

He nearly broke something trying to contain his laughter—his cover had unbent a lot around the team, but not enough to be comfortable joking about cuddling his commanding officer—but the extra effort to fake discomfort was worth it for the entertainment value.

“Who are you, by the way?” Michelle asks, and he gives her another once-over as he pockets the picture.

Physically, she’s identical to Simmons. She has the same speech patterns, the same mannerisms, and—though it’s not much on its own, it adds more evidence to the pile—the same haircut. She shifts under his assessing stare, rolling one shoulder back and angling her head to avoid his eyes the same way he’s seen Simmons do a thousand times, and that pretty much tears it.

She might have amnesia—or brainwashing, that’s a definite possibility—but this is absolutely Jemma Simmons.

“Grant Ward,” he says. “We used to be on a team together.”

“We meaning you and this Jemma Simmons person,” she nods. “But I presume that was before you…dropped her out of a bus?”

“Long story,” he dismisses, in response to her puzzled tone. “And no, I’m pretty sure it’s _we_ , as in you and me.”

“Ugh.” She slumps back in her chair, mouth twisting in the same unhappy way it used to every time Grant pulled his stitches. “Not you, as well! I am _not_ Jemma Simmons.”

He could just leave her to whatever amnesia/brainwashing episode this is, toss her in one of his labs and put her to work instead of torturing her like he originally planned—because what’s the point of torturing someone if they don’t know what they’ve done to deserve it?—but he’s curious, now. He wants answers, and he won’t get them if he lets her go on thinking she’s someone she’s not.

So he keeps pushing. “You really, really are.”

“Why can’t you just believe me?” she asks mournfully. “You’re the one who asked in the first place who I really was!”

“I thought you were trying to impersonate her, not suffering some kind of amnesia,” he says. “But trust me, you’re Simmons.”

“No, I’m not,” she says, slowly and carefully, like she’s talking to a complete moron. “There are no blank spots in my memory. My name is Doctor Michelle Avery. I was kidnapped from my home and brought here by madmen. I don’t know them, I don’t know you, and I _don’t_ know why I look so much like—”

“That scar on your stomach,” he interrupts, and she looks down at herself reflexively. “You got it two years ago. We were on a mission in Kenya, and you got stabbed. It needed fifteen stitches; I gave them to you myself, and you spent the whole time alternating between criticizing my technique and scolding your friend Fitz to stop being so squeamish.”

“What?” She shakes her head, right hand resting protectively over the scar. “Don’t be absurd. I got this falling out of a tree—when I was twenty-two, not twenty-six. It was just after I earned my medical degree; my mates and I were drinking and I climbed up the old oak in my boyfriend’s parents’ back garden on a dare.”

…Okay. That answer opens up a whole new possibility, and suddenly Grant’s got the suspicion that he knows _exactly_ what happened to Simmons. But it doesn’t make any sense at all.

“Medical degree, huh?” he asks carefully. “So you’re a doctor-doctor, and not—”

“A biochemist?” she asks, snappishly. “No. I’m a surgeon—as I’ve been telling my captors for several days now.” She looks around the lab a little helplessly. “They kept wanting me to work on some _serum_ of some sort, and I couldn’t get them to understand that I didn’t have the foggiest where to begin.”

Her speech patterns are the same, right down to the way her accent sharpens when she’s annoyed. She has a career close to what Simmons has been doing for SHIELD for the past few years, but far from her actual specialty. She has a detailed and perfectly reasonable memory of something he _knows_ never happened.

All the signs are adding up. There’s just one thing missing.

“You said they kidnapped you from your home,” he says. “Where is that, exactly?”

“The south of England,” she says. “Bournemouth, to be precise.”

“Huh.” He lounges back in his chair, watching her closely. “I’ve never been. Is it nice?”

Hicks, who accompanied him on a brief op in Bournemouth not two months ago, shifts in place. Warrington shoots him a look.

“Oh, yes,” Michelle says. “You should visit sometime.” She smiles slightly. “It’s a magical place.” 


End file.
